


Machine

by Josselin



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-31 22:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6489838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Only a cyborg could do this,” one of the guards said. It was a man Damen had heard called Jord. “A human man couldn’t tie a man to the cross and persist for that second round. He has to be a machine.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Machine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aliencupcake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliencupcake/gifts).



> Ok, so I wrote this back in 2014 as a treat in response to a Yuletide prompt for space opera AU from aliencupcake, and then I didn't finish it right away and then I got shy about posting it in case aliencupcake did not like it, and fortunately aliencupcake received an awesome other fic based on the same request.
> 
> But now it has come out that this fic exists, and there are people interested in reading it, so I am posting.

When Damen roused to consciousness again, the physician with the mushroom hat was tending to his back, and the two guards who were assigned to watch Damen’s cell were attempting to engage the man in conversation.

“Only a cyborg could do this,” one of the guards said. It was a man Damen had heard called Jord. “A human man couldn’t tie a man to the cross and persist for that second round. He has to be a machine.”

The physician was applying the cinnamon-scented salve to Damen’s back. His hands were warm, but the injury was inflamed enough that the application of the salve was painful.

“Cyborgs can’t inherit,” said the other guard. “He wouldn’t be in line for the throne if he had transitioned.”

“Who’s going to confront him?” said Jord. “You’ve seen how his uncle tries to call attention to his implant at every public meeting he can. Each time we’re in port, he finds some reason to highlight it again with a new audience, so that each councilor sees it in his own region.”

The physician seemed to have finished with the salve and was rewrapping Damen’s back with bandages. He pulled the fake skin used for bandaging tight and Damen grunted at the pressure.

The guards refocused their conversation to address Damen directly. “Well, at least we know you’re human,” said Jord’s companion. “We’ve seen you bleed.”

“Implants don’t stop you from bleeding,” said Jord.

“Not unless you’ve transitioned,” said the other guard, which sparked a bit more debate between the two of them, until Jord appealed to the physician to resolve the dispute.

There weren’t cyborgs at all in Damen’s homeland of Akielos. There were free men, who lived their lives according to a code of honor, and there were slaves, who were captured honorably in war or auctioned at the market because their families couldn’t afford to care for them, and if a man owned a slave he treated him with fairness. But even slaves were still men. They were still human; if a man beat his slave the slave still bled. If a slave beat the master the master bled. It was nothing like Vere.

In Vere, men intermixed with cyborgs. All of the nobility in Vere had implants of one type or another, it seemed, and they kept companions who were similarly decorated, so it was not unusual to meet a man who had a perfectly normal appearance until he turned his face the other direction and Damen realized that the other side of his head was an elaborate metallic machine. Men replaced their eyes with more sophisticated sensors, men’s companions optimized their mouths or their genitals for enhanced pleasure, men decorated themselves and improved themselves, and though the Veretians all seemed to agree that there was a line after which such modification was undesirable, it was almost impossible for an outsider to be able to tell where that line was.

The difference the Veretians seemed to draw was between true men (regardless of whether they had implants, which was more of a status symbol than anything else) and those who had ‘transitioned,’ which Damen gathered meant they had turned over enough of their cognitive powers to engineering that they no longer felt or breathed or lived like men who had been born out of a woman’s womb, but that they just existed, like a piece of machinery.

“Keep me out of it,” the physician told the guards, packing up his extra bandages and salves into his case and adjusting his hat. “No strenuous movement,” he told Damen firmly, and then removed himself from the room, brushing past the guards while he exited.

The door to Damen’s cell was the kind of transparent energy field that a man could see only when he touched it and received an unpleasant shock. Damen had discovered that the first day he had been kept there. But it did not interfere with conversation between the guards outside the cell and Damen within it, so Damen had attempted, in the time he’d been held prisoner, to embark on a determined cultural exchange.

“You saw him in the baths on Arles,” said one of the guards. “Was he human?”

The question drew Damen’s mind back to that day in the baths. Arles had baths in the old fashioned style, giant echoing chambers of delicate porcelain tiles, heated pools of water surrounded by alcoves with stacks of old fashioned fabric towels for drying rather than the air jets that dried the body with one blast of air. It was a luxury that only the very rich could afford to indulge, but Laurent was rich enough to do so. And Laurent was powerful enough that after he determined Damen’s touch had offended that he could drag Damen back to his ship and then claim a captain’s right to martial justice in his uncle’s absence.

All Damen had done was reach out to touch the place where Laurent’s implant touched skin -- not out of impudence, he hadn’t realized until later how taboo it was to touch such a place. But he had simply been curious, he had never seen the intertwining of the human body with such careful machinery before, and Laurent’s expression as he’d stood in the baths had been blank and devoid of feeling, as though he were a robot just like his guards had speculated.

But Damen had seen Laurent’s expression after Damen had reached out to touch him, he had seen the quickening of Laurent’s breath after Damen ran his fingers along Laurent’s skin, and he had seen the glint of determination in Laurent’s eyes when he bet the man an old fashioned gold coin that he couldn’t beat Damen to death. Those were not the reactions of a machine. The door to Damen’s cell might shock him when he touched it, but it didn’t quiver in reaction. The door didn’t have blue eyes whose pupils widened slightly with surprise. The door didn’t punish Damen with greater intensity for the impudence of having caught it with a true human reaction, either.

The guards had seemingly given up on any sort of response from Damen and had continued their own discussion.

“I wouldn’t fuck a cyborg,” said Jord. “It’s not done.”

“It’s not talked about in polite company,” said the other guard. “It happens all the time.”

“Better to stick with men,” said Jord.

“Do you never wonder?” said the other guard. “If I’d been invited into the baths I might have ended up in the same spot.”

But Damen had never doubted that Laurent was a man.

The Regent returned on board, and if Damen hadn’t heard the buzz of excitement from the guards talking to the servants outside his door, he might have sensed it from the electricity emitted when the engines were running -- they were moving again, their leader returned from his vacation.

It was a surprise, however, when the Regent came to see Damen in his cell. One of the Regent’s guards nodded at one of the Prince’s guards, and Jord pressed his palm up against the panel next to the door and the energy field shimmered out of existence. The Regent’s two guards came in to the cell and then the Regent himself stepped through the door, calmly. Another well dressed man followed behind him, Damen’s cell suddenly full of strangers.

“Kneel,” said one of the Regent’s guards, and Damen shifted to his knees, keeping his eyes on the floor.

The Regent circled Damen to inspect his back. He pointed at Damen and spoke to the other noble who visited with him. “This is barbaric,” he told his companion. “How unfeeling of my nephew to have administered such brutality.”

The companion murmured something in agreement, his expression while regarding Damen’s back appropriately concerned.

The Regent’s visit resulted in Damen being pulled into a larger presentation. Later that day he was summoned to a formal appearance in the audience room. Laurent’s physician seemed displeased, and argued with Radel about how Damen ought to be dressed, whether he was strong enough to stand -- Damen settled this dispute by simply standing up -- and if paint might interact badly with the salve and Damen’s other treatments. After these elaborate preparations, Damen was led off through the halls of the ship to the audience room.

The entire council was present. The members who were currently on the ship stood there in person, the others were participating via holograph, the two were only distinguishable via the occasional flicker of static as the ship moved close to a star or through a magnetic field.

The Regent meted out justice in an efficient and methodical way. He listed off Laurent’s trespasses, paraded Damen in a circle as evidence of the injuries Laurent had caused, and then decreed his penalties.

Laurent stood motionless throughout the proceeding, expressionless as his funds were reduced and his privileges as the heir curtailed.

But then at the end, the Regent said, “Embrace the slave,”and the flicker of expression on Laurent’s face might not have been visible throughout the entire audience chamber, but Damen was standing right next to him. Laurent had his hand on the chain attached to Damen’s wrist. To Damen, the feeling in Laurent was as clear as the sun rising.

Laurent turned Damen’s direction, and leaned in delicately to brush his lips across Damen’s cheek. His touch was so precise that Damen could hardly feel the motion of Laurent’s breath, though their skin was a hair’s distance apart.

“If you think what I have done to you is cruel,” said Laurent, “You will think it gentle in comparison to what I will do with you if I ever find you crying to my uncle again.”

Damen met his eyes easily. “You are just a man,” he said to Laurent, and there was a flash of something that might have been fear in Laurent’s eyes before the press of the audience chamber drew them apart.

**Author's Note:**

> [fic on tumblr](http://josselinkohl.tumblr.com/post/142432249422/so-per-the-requests-earlier-today-i-dug-out-and)


End file.
